September 03, 2018

Planting The Flag

The new movie celebrating Neil Armstrong as the first man on the moon slides right past the planting of an American flag on the moon. Forget it, Jack, it's Hollywood and waving the flag is for redneck rube Trump voters, amirite? Anyway, the moon landing was a human achievement, not an American one. Set aside that Kennedy had announjced a space race against the Soviets, who had an early lead due to their expertise with heavy rockets. Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin had challenged American know-how and Kennedy responded with a race to the moon. But humanity won!

The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.

"It was just over a year and a half ago plenty of these morons in the media were eagerly swallowing whole BS stories about Trump looking for 'The Gorilla Channel' on his TV remote & wandering around the White House in his bathrobe chugging Diet Coke all day.
They're all morons."

Deplorable Don Surber believes Woodward was played, and that his book, like Wolff's and Omarosa's, is full of canards.

I agree with the Captain that the security people were too slow to act. In fact, WTF? Corrupt FBI or DOJ witnesses get giant goons to protect them from the Senators and Reps at hearings closed to the public. What does Kavanaugh get, a 5'6" nerd with a clipboard?

Momto2
Should have donated the expensive clothes.
We should not give in to accommodating rude, crude and unrefined behavior of Dems.
They succeeded in making themselves look crass and unprofessional.
Make campaign ads showing their boorish behavior.
None of the people on that committee will secure the Dem nomination because they are too stupid to win it.
Most Americans want a normal president to lead them .
These people are just partisan hacks.
TomR:
You are eroding what little support you have here by your attacks on CH.
He has been here longer than you and when push comes to shove he will garner all the loyalty we have to give.

"In featuring Mr. Kaepernick in the “Just Do It” campaign, Nike grossly insults the men and women who really do make sacrifices for the sake of our nation. We are calling on all our member officers, their families and friends to join in boycotting all Nike products."

"It would seem to me that Gen. Kelly, in the interest of the country, needs to resign and with a statement that says, 'The presidency can no longer be entrusted to this man,'" Bernstein said on CNN after reviewing the contents of the book.

Bernstein went on to say what Kelly should write in a resignation statement.

"'We now have a picture of what we’ve all been dealing with here,'" Bernstein said the chief of staff should write in a resignation. "'I will be happy to appear before committees of Congress ... and tell them what I have seen about this president of the United States and whether or not he is competent and able to lead the United States.'"

It IS happening here. It's happening right now in these ridiculous hearings, with the Democrat Party openly working to not only turn the process into a sideshow, but actively endangering the lives of a Supreme Court nominee, and his children.

It's not enough to simply run campaign ads using the footage of Dems beclowning themselves.

There need to be much more serious costs for all this madness - today's garbage, the attacks on President Trump's staffers, the censorship of conservative views on social media, the ongoing witch hunt and persecution by Mueller and his team, and on and on and on...

This shit needs to be stopped. The Dems and the left and the MSM need to be made to pay a heavy price for this, and soon.

Oh, and then there was the moment when you know he knows he has it in the bag.

I have served with 17 other judges, each of them a colleague and a friend, on a court now led by our superb chief judge, Merrick Garland.
You don't call out the guy whose nomination was hijacked so you could get the gig unless you know the people out there gagging on the whole notion do not count.

The fact is that Brett Kavanaugh is a Republican political animal. He was a public political animal before he was a judge and he remains one now. He has at least one finger in every conservative Republican sludge pie of the past 20 years...

He issued an dissenting opinion that was later cited by the Supreme Court to kill a regulatory board that grew out of the Enron scandal. He was an enthusiastic bed-sniffer—and, if Richard Durbin was correct in his prepared statement on Tuesday, an enthusiastic leaker "of salacious details"—in the employ of Kenneth Starr. He was on the legal team that tried to keep Elian Gonzalez in this country. He was the one who awoke President George W. Bush so the president could sign the law seeking to interfere in the death of Terri Schiavo. (Whatever other involvement he had in that episode is stashed somewhere in those White House documents that the administration* doesn't want anybody to see.)

Thanks for that. I tried to get some traction with the previous IBM guy hustling in that space, but as you would expect, he was a bit full of himself and didn’t listen. The techies at the RRs snicker at the idea that Watson is going to fix their problems. One of the smarter guys at UPRR did an analytic process of overlaying our wheel impacts with warm bearings (not at the alarming level) to correlate the bearings being distressed, but not broken. The other RRs tried to adopt it, but it was a bit beyond their ability.

My biggest pet peeve in the whole detection realm is qualitative vs quantitative results. Lots of suppliers don’t know the difference and then wonder why the committees get frustrated when they can’t set a threshold for billing for repairs. So Watson-like mechanisms will always fail because there is always a lot of noise to signal out there.

I agree with RALPH, Sotomayor and Kagan had the good sense not to bring their children to their SCOTUS hearings. Imagine the savaging from the GOP plants in the hearing room.
And while I'm at it. Conservatives should never take their children to restaurants unapproved by FULL COMMIES. Churches is it okay to take our kids to churches? What about Chik fil a. Am I a bad parent for buying my son a chicken sandwich at an unapproved chik fil a.

"It would seem to me that Gen. Kelly, in the interest of the country, needs to resign

IMO nothing more than confirmation that the Progtards are scared shitless of GEN Kelly. How many times have they tried to paint a false narrative that GEN Kelly and Trump are at odds with one another and that Kelly secretly despises Trump?

Coming back to something posted 2 days ago during the Pope discussion.

it's re the "Holy Spirit"... a comment was made to the effect "the Holy Spirit is in all of us."

No.

Categorically and absolutely because the statement implies (no matter what its intended meaning might have been) some innate state of being in the Spirit simply by breathing air. Not so.

an even finer point: the capacity to use our Free Will is in all of us--- and it is the use of Free Will to accept the presence of the Holy Spirit in this World, THAT is the opportunity we all share.

BUT! Few choose to open their hearts to receive the Holy Spirit, and, therefore choose to LIVE in the Spirit.

"Many are called, but few are chosen."

the Nazarene's words.

The twist: (often ignored)we enter the ranks of "the chosen" by what we do NEXT with our lives after living by our own feeble designs (no matter how much status and prestige the realm of Caesar assigns).

We become one of the chosen based on what we choose.

The Spirit descends upon a human being ONLY after it surrenders to the laws of the Almighty (and if these are brokered by a Church so be it) to guide.

We are INCAPABLE of "creating" fairness, justice, charity, and other cardinal virtues based on our own unguided thoughts.

Yes, we are capable of practicing what "we think" these virtues are.

And, we are capable of fighting great wars over what "we think" these virtues are.

In this crowded, interconnected world, we are losing our way when all things are added together.

The Founders are a case in point.

they were inspired because they consecrated their work before they started, with binding acknowledgements of the inalienable rights, conferred by a Divine imbuement of FREE WILL in all "men."

they conceived a Nation. War birthed it. Interpreters of the Founders intent have brought us to this very day.

In contrast, we have a recent example in Senator McCain: his "virtuousness" extolled by the Lost.

Today we see legislators whoring themselves and our Constitutional freedoms.

And what have they wrought? Their best thinking got us here.

Same goes for the individual: until the individual RECEIVES the Holy Spirit, through a "sacred heart" (maheo-- in Northern Cheyenne), virtue will grow on a shallow, flimsy "man-made" foundation.

We, the People have a birthright which is granted and conserved through our judicious use of our Free Will. Free Will is the bedrock of any moral code that is by definition MORAL, not negotiated ETHICS.

The absence of the Holy Spirit ( a living tether to the Divine Presence in All things) is being demonstrated ALL OVER the world. The outcomes, the carnage and deceitful destruction in the Name of "The Greater Good" is proof that the Holy Spirit isn't some innate capacity intrinsic to human nature.

At any rate, my apologies in advance to any atheists here. My intention was to extoll the power of a code explained to us by Christ through the problematics of interpretive Gospels written by flawed human beings--- and codified by even more flawed dogmaticians centuries removed by the simple teachings of the Nazarene.

Your paths *are* your own.

This is *my* understanding of the Living Word, the Great I AM. A limitation of Creation, an order-conserving fact of Living.

i remain open to the possibility that others here might understand something in a way that i do not as of right now.

James D. --- of course you're correct. what i meant was the wearing of uniforms as symbols of conformity to the National Socialist creed, the reification of "social justice warriors", that was all.

when "it" happened in Germany, the full-on emergence of uniforms and material identifiers, a shadow government was already in place. i believe this is what you and i and the rest of us here already understand re what time it is.

i'd like to share your comment within my network. i'm narrating things within that group to elevate commentary above the "outrage" hard-pan which is causing people to withdraw from a perceived emotion loop that takes us nowhere.

Patents. Don’t get me started. :) As Chitown well knows, I’m blocked from doing more things than allowed by my own efforts due to the patent tangle. At this point I’d rather get no benefit and see things get deployed then have the industry continue to limp along without gaining the productivity and improved safety. Frustratin’ as hell.

There's no way any of this is moving the needle in the Dems's direction.

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."

- Sun Tzu

Trump has a unique ability to get the Progtards to display their true nature, which should repulse any American who considers themselves a patriot. As long as Trump and the MAGA agenda wins national elections then he has the initiative in the overall culture war against the pro-Marxist leftists. We won't actually have to fight a conventional war against the pro-Marxists leftists because they will destroy themselves with their own behavior.

Throughout his life, Neil saw Apollo in the context of the evolution of aviation and credited the team effort of 400,000 Americans with putting a man on the moon. And he would not be amused by all this flag kerfuffle.

Armstrong was a stellar aviator with an unearthly gift for calm at addressing problems. He was a man w/a wry wit and had an economy w/words in conversation. Traits you'd want in a test pilot but not necessarily the 'right stuff' for the central character of a multi-million dollar movie. It frustrated colleagues, the media and often his own family, including his first wife, Jan.

The director and lead actor in 'First Man' are young. Worse, Gosling's a Canadian. Besides, it’s all a classic Hollywood 101 publicity move.

Michael Collins designed the flight patch for Apollo 11. There is no U.S. flag in it, either. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins also made a deliberate decision not to have their names on their flight patch- a nod to the “for all ‘mankind'” aspect of the flight. And NASA management directed a change in the insignia, having the Eagle carrying an olive branch, a universal symbol of peace, in the talons, so as not to appear so menacing [Collins noted in his book ‘Carrying The Fire’ noted it really should have been in the bird’s beak.]

But w/o getting into the weeds on this myopic topic, rabid rednecks at RedState, kneejerk dummies at Fox & Friends and kiddies on ‘ass’orted blogs etc., aren’t exactly up to speed on the matter, either.

The stated objective of Apollo 11 was to take man to the moon, make a landing there and return him safely to Earth. Rocks and flags were farther down the list.

The decision for Apollo 11 to carry and plant the U.S. flag on the moon wasn’t finalized until weeks before the flight. So late in planning, in fact, that the slim, rectangular ‘carrier’ for the flag and staff was attached to the backside of the LM ladder. [Later flights had it stored in the MESA of the LM.]

There was strong internal debate over whether to use the U.N. flag, concerns about projecting a ‘claim of ownership’ and so forth, based on comments by Nixon early in 1969.

But to boil off the fat, ultimately it came down to acknowledging it was the American people who committed to the project [with support that waxed and waned over the decade BTW, folks] financed it [Project Apollo was paid for back in those days, kids] and earned the right to have that recognized.

Apollo 11 did carry flags to the moon and back from most, but not all, of the nations existing on Earth in 1969 w/only a few exceptions- notably Red China, Cuba and one or two others.

And for you flag fanatics, in case you don't know, the U.S. flag was knocked over by the LM rocket exhaust as they left Tranquility Base. Aldrin saw it fall and this was confirmed by recent LOR images of the Apollo landing sites. It will lay there forever the lunar dust. Besides, the LM legends have a U.S. flag and the words 'United States' on the descent stage still there.

But if you’re a partisan weenie into controversy, the big ones come from Nixon himself, who had his signature etched into the commemorative plaque attached to the Eagle but had little to do w/Apollo and nixed plans to use the USS John F. Kennedy as a recovery ship and had the USS Hornet sent instead. His phone call to the crew during the moonwalk was a bit controversial at the time as well.

This is all in the history books, kids.

Hollywood is never going to tell this story well-- especially w/so much real world TV and documentaries already made about it. And it's a different sort of tale than Apollo 13. The only 'drama' was the landing itself.

Neil's back story is interesting but not all that different from other test pilots of his era like Yeager or Crossfield. The life stories of Von Braun - or Lindbergh- would make for richer characters for a biopic. If Neil had been told to plant marigolds instead of a flag on the moon he'd have done so if it was what was 'best for the mission.'

Have read the book but won't pay to see the film. Can't top the real thing.